Goldman Sachs Keeps Firing More Bankers

Many of the bankers once thought of as the golden boys of Wall Street were handed pink slips Thursday, as Goldman Sachs laid off more workers in its continued efforts to trim costs and stay afloat in a volatile market climate.

About 100 people were cut from the bank’s sales and trading division this week, The Wall Street Journal reports, a sign that the cloud that hung over Goldman in the first quarter of the year hasn’t moved on just yet.

Goldman’s first quarter revenue fell 40 percent year-over-year. In those same three months, the Journal says it cut its head count by 1 percent, to 36,500. This week’s new round of cuts brings the year’s total losses to 10 percent of its debt-trading workforce, which means hundreds of Goldman employees are out of luck.

Though market conditions seemed to right themselves as spring came around, the bank will continue to clean house. Last month, Bloomberg reported that Goldman was in the midst of a budget-slashing blitz that not only included laying off workers, but also relied on replacing higher-paid senior employees with junior bankers. And life for those junior bankers was getting far less glamorous than the booze-fueled, expense-account-sponsored lunches and client nights of lore. Bloomberg reported that all employees were having their expenses scrutinized and ordered to pull back. The bank’s C.E.O., Lloyd Blankfein, said earlier this year that he was keeping an “eagle eye” on Goldman’s expenses. “We can do a lot more on the cost side if we have to. . . . Necessity really is the mother of invention in this case, especially when you have to deliver a return.”

Goldman bankers should not feel singled out in this pursuit—JPMorgan and Bank of America have also been reining in spending and eliminating jobs in order to deliver returns in an otherwise sluggish environment. That’s hardly consolation, however, for the bankers who spend their midnight hours slumped over an Excel spreadsheet.

This is nightmarish news for bankers, a group that doesn’t traditionally prompt a great deal of sympathy. But this kind of wide-scale employment shift on Wall Street spills over to impact many more people. It explains why the high-end real-estate market in the tony beach towns in Long Island is feeling a pullback, with many expecting the tide to sweep back to property values in Manhattan. That eventually could trickle down to the so-called 99 percent, if conditions persist. So while the image of Wall Streeters spending their weekends listlessly wandering around Sagaponack, packing away Hermès ties, and crying into bone-china cereal bowls might not tug at the heartstrings, these effects might one day boomerang back to Main Street. The losses there will be a lot less glamorous.